


Death Comes To Town

by Cerusee



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Batfam Halloween Content War 2017, Curly Fries, Death Trauma, Emotional Conversations, Gen, Some punching, What's up with that?, generous tipping, men handling their emotions badly, men who only carry billfolds, uh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 22:01:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12567156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerusee/pseuds/Cerusee
Summary: Of all the diners, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into his.And Jason had thought dinner with his estranged older brother was going badlybeforehe spotted that familiar face.





	Death Comes To Town

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Batfam Halloween Content Challenge 2017, for the October 30th prompt, "Death".
> 
> [Helpful link for context re: surprise mystery guest; read before or after as is your preference.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_\(DC_Comics\))

“I’m thinking...a western omelette and hash browns.” Jason closed his menu and dropped it on the table in front of him.

“I was thinking a cheeseburger. You know it’s five o’clock, right?” Dick closed his own.

“The breakfast menu is an all-day menu, and I live the night-life, Dickiebird.”

“If you say so, Jaybird.”

Dick and Jason exchanged casual sneers, until the waitress came by to pour coffee. She took their orders, their menus, and the temperature of the table. She beat a hasty retreat.

“You better tip her a fifty,” Jason said to Dick. “For having to put up with you.”

“Excuse me?” Dick said, annoyed. “I haven’t done anything.”

“Yet,” Jason said, ominously.

Dick ground his teeth and didn’t say a lot of angry things, things like _you’ve murdered people, Jason,_ and also, _you hurt people I love on purpose, Jason,_ not to mention, _where the fuck do you get off, Jason?_

He didn’t have to, because Jason read his thoughts off of him as easily as he’d read a billboard. Jason stood up abruptly, almost knocking over his coffee.

“Yeah, this was a mistake,” Jason said, calmly. “You and I, we’re not talking yet.” He pulled his wallet out of his jacket pocket, and dropped a twenty onto the table. “I meant it about the tip. You’re good for the rest?”

Dick opened his mouth to confirm it, and then the door chimed, and a young woman with black hair came through it, raising an index finger, asking for a solo booth. Dick heard an audible _click_ , the sound of a jaw abruptly shutting tight, and looked across the table to see Jason staring at her.

“Someone you know?” he asked, cautiously.

“Maybe,” Jason said, faintly, not taking his eyes off of her. “Shit. Fucking... _shit_. Dick, you should leave. Right now.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Dick’s eyebrows shot up. “Is she dangerous?”

“I don’t know,” Jason said quietly. “Maybe. But you need to leave.”

“Jason,” Dick said in an exasperated tone, “You know I’m not going to just leave you, much less this diner, if you really think that woman is a threat. Tell me what the hell is going on.”

Jason tore his eyes off her and looked Dick straight in the eye. “I’m not worried she’s going to blow the place up, Dick. I swear on my mother’s grave. It’s not like that. I’m not doing some kind of deal here. I came here to have lunch with your sorry ass, but now there’s a thing I have to handle and I need you to be _somewhere fucking else_.” Jason exhaled. “Please.”

Dick stared at Jason for a minute. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Okay. Text me when you’re done being...you know, you.”

He made sure to stop by the counter before he left, and cancel their orders. 

He dropped another twenty on the table of their booth on the way out.

***

Jason slid into the booth opposite where she sat. 

“Jason.” She beamed at him. “I don’t meet very many people a _third_ time, you know.”

“Is it him? Or is it me?” Jason asked lowly.

“It’s not him, and it’s not you,” she told him. “I wanted some curly fries.”

Jason laughed. “Are you telling seriously me that you— _you_ —stopped in a Gotham diner for some fucking _french fries?_ ”

The boat neckline of her black shirt creased as she shrugged. “I’m on vacation.”

“Vacation,” Jason echoed. “What’s a vacation for you?”

She leaned towards him, conspiratorially, the ends of her dark hair trailing on the table. “Today is my _mortal_ day.”

“What the fuck is a—” 

The waitress—the same one who’d served Jason and Dick—placed a heaping plate of curly fries in front of her. “Can I get you anything else, hon?” she asked.

“I’ll let you know, Emmy. Thank you.” The waitress paused, blinked, and then smiled tentatively, before she moved on to another table.

“That’s not the name on her name tag,” Jason said. “Her name tag says Edna.”

She lifted a fry and dangled it over her upturned mouth, before dropping it in. She made happy noises while she chewed it. “Edna is her birth-name, Jason. But she’s always hated it. Emmy is what her older sister used to call her, before she died in a house fire eight years ago. It’s the name Emmy calls herself in her own mind.”

“Good to know,” Jason said, mentally filing that away for the next time he was here. If he ever came back. Which he probably never would. “Although, if it’s what her dead sister called her and it’s personal, maybe that’s why she didn’t put it on her name tag. Also, what’s a mortal day?”

“That’s a good point. I’ll remember that, Jason.” She munched on another fry. “Once in every century, for a day, I take on mortal form. To remind myself what it is that the living leave behind, when I meet them.” She licked her fingertips and her eyes opened wide. “Wow.” She looked over at Jason. “Can you imagine how _boring_ potatoes would be without salt?”

“Yes, I can,” said Jason, who’d eaten raw potato peelings scrounged from dumpsters out of the fervent desire to stay alive for another day. He’d gotten stomach cramps. “So you’re not here... _for_ anyone?”

“No,” she said, bouncing a curly fry into a small mound of ketchup.

Jason tried to relax. “No one in this diner is about to drop dead of a heart attack or anything?”

“No, Jason. Not today.” She nibbled on the red-drenched half of the fry and then wrinkled her nose. “Say, Jason, do you think you could you explain ketchup to me?”

“Maybe,” Jason said. He took a fry, dipped in into the ketchup mound, ate half of it, and then dropped the other half on the table. “That, and I’ll pick up the tab if I can ask you a question.”

“Gee, thanks,” she said cheerfully. “Ask away.”

Jason crossed his arms over his chest, and bent over the table towards her. “How am I alive?” he asked. “ _Why_ am I alive?”

Death smiled at him.

***

Sitting still was Dick’s least favorite thing. Bruce was good at it, and he’d spent endless hours training Dick in stillness. But Dick hated it. He doubted that Jason would actually alert him when he was done doing whatever he was doing with that woman. And Dick _badly_ needed to know who had gotten that kind of reaction out of Jason, so he’d hung around across the street from the diner, and waited.

Sometimes sitting on his ass paid off. Jason and his girlfriend were leaving the diner together. Dick stumbled to his feet.

Jason and the girl with black hair hugged each other firmly. The girl gave Dick a friendly wave from across the street, then turned and strolled off, stopping briefly to scoop something off the sidewalk and drop it into her pocket. 

Something silver hanging from her neck gleamed, as she bent over. Dick blinked, and the gleam was was gone.

Dick made his way over to Jason. “Want to tell me what that was about, Jay?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I did,” Jason said, gaze lingering where the woman had been.

Dick waggled his eyebrows. “A girlfriend you’ve been hiding from us? An _ex_ -girlfriend you’ve been hiding from us?”

Jason glared at Dick. “Don’t be an asshole.” He strode down the street in the opposite direction from the girl.

Dick followed, matching Jason’s stride with effort. Jason’s legs were, annoyingly, longer than his, and he had to work to keep up. “Half an hour ago, the sight of that woman had you in a panic, but now you’re on hugging terms? C’mon, Jase.”

“I _absolutely_ fucking guarantee you don’t want to know what this is really about, Dick,” Jason said, sounding serious.

It only stoked Dick’s curiosity more.

“Everyone in our weird little family wants to know everything about each other at all times, Jason,” Dick said. He managed to get far enough ahead of Jason to stand straight ahead of him. “The more you evade, the more curious I’m going to be. I got a good enough look at her face to start looking, and now I’m wondering what I’ll find if I do.”

Jason stopped abruptly, a smile tugging at his lips. “You’ll _find_ that her name is Delia Bunson. She’s 19 years old. She has a full-time job as a grocery store clerk. She has no living relatives, and no criminal history or connections. She’s saving money because she wants to go to school to become a veterinary tech.” Jason cocked his head. “None of which is true, and none of which matters, because ‘Delia’ will be dead by the end of the day.” Jason made finger quotes around her name.

Dick grabbed Jason’s arm and physically dragged him into a nearby alleyway. He hissed, “Okay, _first_ of all, just how literal are you being about her being dead by the end of the day, and second, are you implying that you know her actual identity?”

Jason pulled Dick’s hand off of him, then brutally kicked Dick in the stomach, throwing him back against the dumpster that sat at the end of Dick’s unfortunately chosen confessional venue. Dick managed to roll back onto his feet almost immediately, but he stayed bent over, wheezing.

“You know, I’m not actually sure how to answer the first question,” Jason said thoughtfully, but unhelpfully, while Dick struggled for breath and thought about all the things he knew he could do to Jason. In a minute. When he could inhale properly. “But as to the second...yes.”

After a couple of minutes, Dick managed to breathe in shallowly. Once he had air in his lungs, he said, “But...you’re not going to tell me what’s going on...even while that girl is in danger?” His earlier, casual curiosity was morphing into full-blown worry, now that there was talk of what sounded like murder. He coughed violently.

“She’s not in danger, and I already told you, you don’t want to know.”

“Dammit, Jason,” Dick said, still working on his breathing, which was almost back to normal. “Don’t try to tell me what I do and don’t want to know!” 

“I _know_ that you don’t want to know, Dick,” Jason retorted, temper rising to match Dick’s. “I _know_ you that don’t, because it was the most obvious fucking thing in the world, and not once, _not once_ , have any of you assholes _ever_ asked me about it!”

It was daytime, and they were both in street clothes, but they were also both trained to the gills, and Dick wasn’t really surprised when Jason vaulted himself onto the low-hanging end of the alley’s fire escape, pulling himself up faster than most people could even dream of moving.

He had a dark, ugly feeling that he knew what Jason was talking about. And he was also pretty sure that he was being dared to follow.

Better now than before the bruising sent him to bed. Dick took a deep breath just to assure himself he could, then knelt, leapt, and followed.

***

It took a lot of rooftop-jumping, but he eventually found Jason staring at the Wayne Enterprises skyscraper.

He didn’t bother to say anything, or even try to signal his presence; he knew that Jason knew he was there. 

“I died,” Jason said, as if he was speaking to the air, or maybe the distant WE building. His tone was low and harsh. “I died. I was _dead_. I know that I died of smoke inhalation. I’ve read my file. He was really thorough, he was really—he was _Batman_. No detail spared. I had my brains beaten out of my head, and all my bones broken, and Dick, I remember that part, but maybe if he’d gotten there a whole hour faster, Batman could have rescued me so I could have died from something else.”

Oh God, Dick thought. Jason had read his own autopsy report.

Jason kept staring at the skyscraper, his hands fisted at his hips. “I remember coming back to life, too. Just parts of it. I remember waking up screaming in my coffin. Begging Bruce to save me. Scratching frantically at a panel of wood maybe five inches over my face.” Jason’s hand drifted up, a little above his face, as if he was feeling the ceiling of his burial chamber for the first time again. “Pounding at it. Trying to punch it. I hit it so much that my hands were bleeding into my mouth.” He let his hand fall down over his eyes. “And then there was mud and worms and climbing, and more blood, so I guess I made it out.”

Dick wanted nothing more than to throw up. He swallowed very hard, several times in a row.

“You’d think you’d ask, right?” Jason finally turned around and faced Dick. “Forget about me. It shouldn’t be hard. You guys already had practice doing that. But haven’t you ever been curious about the afterlife? Didn’t you ever wonder where your parents were? Didn’t _he_ ever wonder about where his were? Did any of you ever ask where they ended up? Did you _care_? Or did you forget about them as fast as you forgot me?”

Dick punched Jason in the face.

The ensuing brawl was, in the words of Hobbes, nasty, brutish, and short. They were evenly matched, evenly motivated, and both really pissed off.

Afterwards, they laid on the rooftop, side by side.

“Did you?” Dick finally made himself ask, licking blood off of his lips. “Did you meet them?”

“I’m sorry,” Jason said, his voice thick with regret. “I’m sorry I said that shit. I don’t remember anything between the warehouse and the coffin. When I try to think about it, there’s nothing there, except...a feeling that I was _okay_ , somehow.”

Dick could feel blood trickling from his nose down both sides of his face. He sat up, groping in his pockets for a tissue, but all he ever carried in civvies was his phone, his billfold and his keys. He grimaced, and pulled out the softest, most worn bill he could find—which happened to be an aging twenty—and used it to wipe the blood off his face as best as he could, before he tore it in half and balled up the halves to plug his nostrils.

Jason was staring at him with a look of muted horror.

“What?” Dick said, nasally.

“You’re unbelievable,” Jason said. He pulled a packet of tissues out of the pocket of his leather jacket, balled one up, and bounced it off of Dick’s face. “Keep it for next time, you absolute fucking bagel.”

Dick wanted to lie back down again, but upright was better for a nosebleed, so he dragged himself over to lean against a chimney. “I don’t know what that means and I refuse to care.”

Jason, whose airways were, unfairly, fully clear, snorted at him.

“I’m sorry,” Dick said, softly. “You were right. We _didn’t_ want to know.”

Jason dragged himself up onto his elbows, eyes fixed on Dick’s face.

“Bruce asked around at first, you know. I mean—you deserve to know that. He asked everyone he knew who had any... _experience_ in that area. Before we knew it was you. When he just was starting to wonder if it was possible. But as soon as he knew for sure, he stopped asking.”

Jason rolled into a sitting position, spine curled and arms crossed so that his face was obscured.

“He stopped asking, and we took our cues from him. We didn’t ask anymore questions. Even after things started to get better— _you_ didn’t talk about it. And we’ve all been too cowardly to ask you.” Dick gazed at Jason, feeling regret at the back of his throat so thick and bitter that once again, he had to swallow away the urge to vomit.

“She,” Jason said, and his breathing hitched, and he folded in on himself.

For a moment, Dick debated whether to stay where he was, or to get up and put his arms around his spiritually wounded, long-lost brother. But Jason put up a blind hand, without raising his head from his knees, and Dick stayed where he was.

After a minute, Jason raised his tear-streaked face from his knees. “That woman...is death.”

“Pardon?”

“Death, with a capital D.” Jason took in a deep breath, and let it out, slowly. “She’s—she’s _Death._ She’s the Grim Reaper. She’s not grim at all, though. She’s gentle and she’s so kind.” He laughed, briefly, helplessly. “She’s your tour guide on the safari to the Great Beyond. You meet her twice. Once when you’re born—she says no one ever remembers that, though—and again when you die. She takes your hand and walks you into the afterlife. And Dick— _she doesn’t manifest for the living_.”

“Holy shit.” Dick took a second. Okay, a full minute. “No wonder you were so freaked out when you saw her. Did you recognize her? From, um— _before_?” It suddenly struck him how Jason had all but drop-kicked him out of the diner the moment he saw the shadow of death—sorry, _Death—_ poking her pale face through the door, as if it would change anything. He’d been _scared_ for Dick.

“Yeah,” Jason said, scrubbing at his damp face. Dick picked up the balled tissue and threw it back at Jason, who immediately picked it up, unrolled it, and blew his nose. “I didn’t remember her until I saw her today, but as soon as I did, I knew who she was. Remembered what she said to me last time.”

Dick was physically itching to ask what _that_ was, and Jason could obviously tell—Jason’s ability to read people was as impressive as it was annoying—but Jason shook his head. “She was...nice. Kind. The kindest person you’ll ever meet. She tries to take the pain and fear away. That’s sort of why she was in the diner. She wasn’t there _for_ anyone. She told me that every century, she lives as a human—no, that’s not right, she lives as a _mortal_ —for a single day, to remind herself why the living fear her. What they’re leaving behind them when they die. And today’s the day. Her day.”

All of Jason’s earlier, vague pronouncements were starting to make sense, now. Although… “Hell of a coincidence that on her one day living as a human she just happens to run into what I’m guessing is one of the very few people alive who’s met her in her usual capacity.”

Jason’s lips quirked. “Isn’t it, though.”

“Any light you can shed on that for me?”

“Nah,” Jason said, the contrary little prick. “Not today.”

“Fine, asshole,” Dick said, rolling his eyes. Jason smirked at him. “Some other time, then.” 

Sometime when Jason was less emotionally raw than he was right now. Sometime when it was easier for everybody.

Oh damn it. It was never going to be easier.

“Jason,” Dick said suddenly and fiercely, “I’m _done_ being a coward. I’m going to ask you all the questions we never asked you. I’m your brother, damn it, and you deserve better than for all of us to shy away from talking about what happened to y—to avoid talking about everything you’ve been through.”

The smirk dropped off Jason’s face, replaced by something thoughtful and wary, but all he said was, “That speech would have sounded more impressive if you didn’t still have bloody dollar bill snotballs stuffed up your nose.”

Dick flipped him off.

Emotional avoidance was their family’s bread and butter. It was what Bruce did, it was what Dick had learned from him. How to push pain to the side. How to kick it under the bed, bury it under the floorboards, shove it down, down, down, until it was forgotten. Objectively, Dick knew that it wasn’t healthy, but it was easier than confronting it head on.

Jason had never learned how to do that with his pain, but he hadn’t learned how to cope with it, either. Instead, he channeled it into rage, destructive and lethal. 

Jason had endured traumas so bizarrely out of the norm of human experience that no map existed that could be used to navigate the wounds they had left on his spirit. And Dick, and Bruce— _all of them—_ had left Jason alone there, without a guiding light, or even a companion in the darkness. God knew, Jason hadn’t made it easy to help him, when he was bent on destroying Batman and everyone associated with him, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t desperately needed help. They’d let him down. They’d all let him down. And dammit, even if Bruce was too emotionally compromised to deal with Jason, _Dick_ should have been able to find a way to help him. 

“Jase,” Dick said, hesitantly. “Let’s get lunch again soon, okay? My treat. You get to pick the place, and I promise to tip 300% of the check.”

“L’Escalier,” Jason said immediately, naming what Dick knew was the most expensive restaurant in Gotham that Jason knew, because he was a little shit.

“Sounds good,” Dick said, knowing that before it happened, Jason would change his answer to another corner diner or a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant—probably one with amazing hand-made noodles and a secret recipe for duck—just to make sure that the waitress who got the fantastic tip was someone who needed the money right away. “We’ll make a date.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> WHAT UP, yeah I took that prompt as literally as possible. :D
> 
> The character, Death (aka Death of the Endless) is DC canon (she hails from the Sandman series from DC's Vertigo imprint, but has cameo'd a time or two in main continuity), but the whole “spending a day as a human” thing was stolen wholesale from the Neil Gaiman miniseries _Death: The High Cost of Living_ , a companion volume to Sandman. It's very good and you should check it out sometime.


End file.
